Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who has come under fire over accusations of plagiarism and antisemitism, is now seeing her work further scrutinized after it was revealed two professors questioned a data method she used in a 2001 Standford paper that often resulted in “logical inconsistencies” — and she refused to share her research with them.
The 2001 study, titled “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” was one of four peer-reviewed articles that helped land Gay tenureship at Stanford University, but its merit could not be properly reviewed by everyone, according to a post on The Dossier by Christopher Brunet.
In 2002, Michael C. Herron, the Remsen 1943 professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth, and Kenneth W. Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, claimed to debunk the very foundation of Gay’s research.
At a conference of The Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth) that year, Herron and Shotts presented their research, finding inconsistencies in Gay’s paper where she concluded that the election of black Americans to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and rarely increases political engagement among black people.
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According to the two professors, Gay’s analysis and extrapolations were based on the statistical practice known as Ecological Regression (El-R), which Herron and Shotts have spent years demonstrating leads to “logical inconsistencies.”
While Herron and Shotts highlighted errors by other researchers using El-R, they noted that their probe into how Gay reached her conclusion and the stats she listed were limited because she refused to share her research with them.
“We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us,” the researchers noted in their 2002 paper.
Herron told The Post Tuesday that he and Shotts have published multiple reports between 2000 and 2004 looking into how researchers used El-R and the type of results it can produce.
Gay and Stanford did not respond to The Post’s request for comment regarding the inconsistencies highlighted by Herron and Shotts.
Brunet also noted that the 2002 PolMeth program that included Herron and Shotts’ paper was missing from the conference’s website — despite all other programs from 1984 to 2021 being available. PolMeth did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the missing year.
Gay’s 2001 paper is one of two the Harvard president had recently requested corrections for following allegations that she plagiarized many papers during her academic career.
For the 2001 paper, Gay noted that she failed to properly attribute and quote a source from a 1990 paper. The educator has been accused of lifting whole paragraphs without providing citations while studying for her Ph.D. at Harvard.
When The Post looked into the accusations, it received a threatening legal letter from the school denying Gay engaged in any plagiarism.
The scrutiny into Gay’s career and research began when she received backlash over her testimony before the House Education Committee, in which she evaded questions about whether antisemitic chants violated the campus’ code of conduct.
With the controversy surrounding Gay, Harvard’s governing board is facing calls from faculty to resign as critics say the Ivy League university’s reputation has taken a “substantial hit” over the allegations surrounding its president.
The university did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the latest allegation facing Gay.